The Realization of Perfection
by Lerayl
Summary: Caught somewhere between dream and duty, Franziska von Karma regathers the events and forces that have shaped her life.
1. brother

**part one: brother**

There were certain lessons in life that Franziska had learnt to accept as gospel since a very early age.

One was that being a prodigy meant that every waking moment of her life was of both vital and intriguing significance to the world at large, and that the world wanted exclusive knowledge of every detail. This was not to be confused with genuine curiosity. The world also had a very rigid idea as to what each of the moments of a prodigy's life should contain, idyllically film-like, and had a habit of reacting badly when those ideas were challenged.

A prominent example would be on the question of her first words; her first memories. The very early childhood of a prodigy was of particular interest, as every mother and father on the face of the earth secretly harbored hopes that they could unlock the secret formula with which to make their children equally as exceptional. So it was with a surprising degree of frequency that this question arose throughout her lifetime. By the time she was eleven and had more than a dozen law books memorized by heart, she was well aware of the proper answer; it was refined and recited in her mind until it had the glossy sheen of a magazine photograph.

Her first memory had been of the courthouse, smelling of ancient wood and the symbol of her destiny laid before her. The details were perfectly arranged in a bulleted list, to be laid out at a moment's notice: her father had been prosecuting a case on charge of serial murder. And from her vantage point amongst the spectators, she had had the opportunity to see the demonstration of the impenetrable logic she was to inherit, and the subsequent destruction of the wicked that it would bring about. She had scarcely been three years of age at the time, but regardless had understood in heart and soul from that point on what it meant to be a part of the von Karma lineage. Her first word, of course, had been _papa._ Not papa for the man, sneering as he put the unfortunate defense attorney of the week in his place, but _papa_ for absolution; _papa_ for perfection. Papa for legacy, and everything it embodied in her flesh and in her blood.

This was the story. It was what the world wanted to hear; even more importantly, it was what her _father _wanted to hear. It was the stuff legends were made of, embedded forever into the books of legal history.

It was only after reaching the age of thirteen, sitting alone in a hotel in Germany, that she spoke aloud with closed eyes towards the ceiling where no one could hear. She had made up the entire thing. She'd never attended that trial. Rather, she had researched her father's records to find a case date in which nobody would be able to conceivably contest her story; the days before Manfred von Karma's pride had been willing to admit that he had sired a second daughter.

Her first memory had been of the mansion, dimmed and darkened as it always was, surrounded by the ebony of polished marble and a dozen ancient portraits lined against the walls. She couldn't remember the time of day; just that she was able to see the dust afloat in the air with dots of sunlight reflecting from them--a wave of sparkles suspended at her fingertips. When she exhaled, they danced before her. This was before she learned the proper reaction when faced with such a scenario: of immediately summoning and scolding the housekeepers for doing such an unacceptable job in keeping the place spotless.

This was the story. No grandiose tale that formed the promise of a grandiose life; nothing related in any way to bloodlines or predecessors or prosecution; just a tiny girl blowing at wisps of airborne filth like a rat from the streets. And dreaming.

She had been so ashamed of that memory. Because the second cardinal rule was that a von Karma did not dream. A von Karma knew their purpose from the second they were born, their fate engraved into the first breath they took. Dreams were for the weak; the self-indulgences of pathetic men whose only purpose in life was to provide a platform for the exceptional to rise above.

Papa was the exceptional. Papa was a force that had torn into her life with the force of a hurricane the instant he recognized that this flesh of his flesh might hold promise as an extension of his own perfection.

Franziska had no clear memories of her father before, or outside of, her practice of law and its use as a weapon against the base and the foolish. She could not recall hearing the sound of his voice, stern and gravelly in its constant criticism, without the weight of a whip at her side.

But where there had not been Papa, there had been Miles Edgeworth.

She had never fully comprehended that he had not always been there; she'd intrinsically accepted his physical dissimilarities and unfamiliar last name as a natural extension of his other peculiarities. He was solitary in her remembrances; his features defined and vivid in a sea of faceless crowds and simpering idiots. He had always been with her. He was a constant. Little brother.

She had preserved many early recollections of her little brother, from the lost days before she'd begun the ritual of attending her father's lectures in the morning. They were silent and ethereal, grainy like an old film--and most seemed to revolve at their core around his silent figure, staring out of the windows lining the chambers throughout the house: into the courtyard, across the gardens, through the streets where automobiles raced in torrents of lurid smoke--shoulders hunched and eyes downcast in what she had then defined as _weakness_ and had only recently brought herself to recognize as _yearning._ Yearning for many things; a complex tangle of things that even now Franziska could not fully process, or perhaps was still afraid to.

He had infuriated her. She had pulled at him, tearing the seams of his jacket coming loose; she had torn away buttons and pressed her hands against his face and demanded that he _grow up. _She stood on chairs to tape bedroom sheets over the windows, enveloping the interior of the house in complete darkness. She had gone as far to stick a fork in his hand when he had shown the nerve to begin pulling one of them down.

His target at the time had been the window that gave the clearest view of the courthouse, solemn embodiment of judgment as it always was, and the prison just beyond it. It was the only act of rebellion he'd made in Franziska's war against the concept of his loneliness.

"Grow up!" she screamed, hard enough for her throat to hurt, hard enough for her lips to quiver with the force of it. She willed it at him with all of her might, mentally searing the words into his brain, watching for the flicker of an epiphany in his eyes. But no matter how she raised her voice, balled her fists, and yanked at his hair--he remained blank and uncomprehending.

Grow up.

Franziska turned on her heels and left him there, striding with fists clenched back to her room. He made a sound towards her retreating back, which she ignored. She did not stop until she had reached the doors of her own room, which slammed shut behind her as she threw her private tantrum at Miles Edgeworth's refusal to be _fixed._

A von Karma was supposed to be capable of remedying any problem within their sights. A von Karma's strength of will was iron, crushing all those beneath its weight and setting any inconsistencies back to their proper course, whether they be documented evidence or fellow human beings. Miles Edgeworth, somehow, would not adhere to this most basic of truths, and therefore rendered her world incomprehensible.

It was more than that, of course. It marked the beginning of her lifelong failure to assuage that quiet sense of grief and of yearning she recognized in him since the start of her conscious lifetime, and the beginning of her failures as Manfred von Karma's daughter, before she had even truly begun.

Hours later, she returned back to the place with the half-covered window, full of the lingering remnants of her anger and bitterness-- and something in her reeled to discover Miles, who had failed to move from the spot where she had stabbed him. He was watching the blood cake on his skin in a strange, entranced kind of fascination. She had wanted to scream anew. She wanted to retch. She wanted to knock his head upside the closest wall and see if that would finally get the message across.

"Stupid! Stupid! _Stupid!"_

He raised his head, seeing her, but not _understanding._

She wanted to cry, at both his helplessness, and at her own.

Instead, Franziska opted to slap him hard before physically dragging him downstairs in order to personally wrap his hand. No doubt if he tried to tend to it himself, he would botch the job somehow, the foolishly foolish _fool._ He went with her without protest, and she could feel the rough scabs coating his flesh under her own. The fork lay forgotten on the floor tiles.

She wasn't tall enough to reach the medical cabinets on her own, so Miles had had to pull them down for her. When he didn't respond immediately to her shrill orders, she had stomped on his foot.

Grow up.

It was two weeks later, in a conversation with the head of housecleaning, that she learned that at the time Miles had been unable to understand a word she was saying because he did not speak German.

Grow up.

If she was horrified, she was horrified at his show of self-pity, his appalling show of weakness and sickening ignorance. He had been living with she and her father at that point for three years. He only had himself to blame. Even if the vast majority of the household primarily spoke English. Even if the same was true of her father. A von Karma does not feel sympathy.

No, a von Karma sees a problem before them and does everything in their power to make it disappear.

She had raided her father's library the following day, carrying thick editions of Germanic dictionaries to his room where he sat studying, two at a time. Miles had turned towards her, puzzled at this bizarre interruption. Heavy books on evidence law were strewn across his desk; Franziska showed no shame in kicking these aside to make room for her assignment of choice, which obviously took higher priority. He reached down to retrieve them; caught the look in her eye, and thought better of it.

"Read these," she ordered, in English. "Now you have no more excuses." She jabbed a finger in his face for emphasis, lower lip jutted out so that he understood just how serious a matter this was.

If possible, he looked even more baffled than before. They locked gazes before he seemed to realize she was waiting for him to immediately follow orders, slowly reached over--still incredulous--and opened the cover of the index closest to him. Satisfied, task completed, Franziska turned and strode back out through the doors with her head held high.

Miles never knew peace in the month after that announcement. At each mealtime when Papa was away on business (and therefore a minimal amount of riotous behavior at the table could be tolerated), or any other moment she caught him when it did not appear to him he was vigorously practicing, she immediately began barking at him in her native language and pinched him hard when she got bewildered silence in return. Miles had taken to inconspicuously sliding their forks and knives under his sleeve, safely out of her reach, and quickly taught himself how to cut even thick slices of meat with the dull edge of a spoon.

"You're not even _trying,_" she said, bristling with rage, her small fingers pulling him down and smoothing out an unacceptable crinkle in his jacket. He didn't deny it. He never denied any of the accusations she would make towards him; about the state of his clothes, the state of his mind, the state of his _everything._

But it took a total of forty-six days for the miracle to happen.

During the last vestiges of autumn, Franziska was tearing through her wardrobe with the impassioned fervor of a six year old girl whose heart was set on a particular piece of clothing and could not be swayed into accepting substitutes. She had several piles of hangars resting at her feet by the time Miles, on hearing the commotion, had stuck his head through the doorway, the tip of a quill between his teeth. He watched her go at for several minutes without comment. When she began kicking the nearby furniture in frustration, however, he finally went on to inform her in perfect German: the article of clothing in question was currently in the wash, presumably due to the garden dirt she'd managed to smudge it up with last evening.

She'd thrown a shoe at him in answer. It rebounded off of his forehead with a most satisfying _crack._

But it was strange. Ever since that single breakthrough, she found that, for some reason, she was now perfectly happy to converse with him in English. She never heard him speak German again, and more than once she found herself wondering if she had only ever imagined what had happened at the door.

It was after that that they'd taken to studying law together, even while he still sported the bruise on his head from her projectile attack. If he'd been ahead of her in terms of legal complexity at first, she quickly caught up to him, and if Miles had felt threatened by the idea of a girl half his age being an intellectual equal, he failed to show it. They traded surprise verbal exams on any number of obscure legal facts: if he got it wrong, he earned a thwap upside the head and a fierce lecture; if she got it wrong, she earned a quiet flicker of a smile.

Franziska refused to admit to herself that she had deliberately botched these contests more than twice.

They challenged each other in other ways. Prosecution, they knew, was not a simple matter of presenting facts and testimony. What it meant to be a prosecutor was carried in body language, in argumentation, in the presentation of your own confidence. It was almost unfortunate that this aspect of the profession seemed to come naturally to both of them; their mock confrontations escalated in theatrics to the point that they were making outright farces of themselves. Miles had been able to perfect his imitation Papa's trademark wave of the finger to the level of an art form, and Franziska was forced to deny all allegations to her outburst of incredulous laughter at this accomplishment for years afterwards.

Something else in particular they'd taken to was playing chess. It was Miles's initial idea. He actually hadn't said much of anything in challenge; simply dropped the board in front of her with a familiar, smug quirk of the eyebrows. She promised herself she would throttle him as soon as she defeated him in the game.

The sentiment increased a dozenfold when Miles, ever so casually, laid her bishop flat with a brisk flick from his knight.

That game quickly rose to the levels of unprecedented epic warfare; there was one turn in which Franziska took a full twenty minutes to work out her next move, surrounded by an amalgam of Miles's pawns, commanded by a stray bishop. Inevitably, their earlier rounds of practice at psychological warfare came into play: Miles scoffed, shrugged his shoulders, and remarked on the comparative ability of a primate's capacity to strategize to his opponent's. By the time she had decisively cornered him into a checkmate, Franziska had modified her promise to ensure a drop-kick out of at _least_ a second-story window as a follow-up to the throttling.

Miles blinked in surprise. But then he shrugged again and graciously tipped his king face-down on the board in defeat. "Well done," he conceded. "But you are now aware I can't allow this to pass without requesting a rematch."

The first game had taken them upwards of two hours. She agreed instantly.

They simultaneously set about preparing for the second round. Miles regathered his pawns first, and then proceeded in order of pieces of ascending power. When his fingers closed around the white queen, he hesitated, turning it over in his hands in quiet contemplation.

"Franziska," he said abruptly, "You're the reason I'm alive."

For an instant, everything inside her froze.

Impossible.

She'd pretended she hadn't heard, returning her own knights and bishops to their proper positions. What an absurd, foolish thing to say. But she knew that no matter how hard she tried, she had never been able to stamp out that persistent streak of sentimentalism in her little brother. Yes. It was certainly little more than his ridiculous softness emerging once again.

The flash of inward panic and its cause faded quickly enough in the face of the beginning of the next game. Miles seemed as willing to pretend it had never happened as Franziska, and was quickly distracted regardless by his second, considerably more humiliating, defeat.

They played at least once a week after that; it wasn't uncommon for them to hold virtual tournaments, lasting several days in a row. She would be in the midst of any variety of activities when the board would abruptly clatter in front of her face in challenge. But Franziska's triumphs over Miles remained constant as they both used each other to master the use of the board. The ending of the stories they crafted always remained the same: Miles shaking his head, expression more thoughtful than angry, before bowing the figure of the white king to hers.

She fought hard for each checkmate, to be certain, but even after years of play continued to uphold her perfect string of victories. As much as she prided herself in this accomplishment, she had no qualms about expressing her deep disappointment in her little brother, either.

"Are you even trying?" she demanded, hands on her hips. "Is something wrong with your brain? Do you honestly expect to uphold the von Karma creed with that display of paltry skill, Miles Edgeworth?"

He looked bemused. "I wonder."

The response infuriated her all the more in its apparent indifference. A von Karma could not afford indifference. To a von Karma, the division between victory or defeat was synonymous with the division of life or death. She shook with righteous fury at the idea that Miles could place so little value on the question of his life.

(It was an unspoken rule between them to never bring up the contradiction, to never break the chain of doublethink that permitted Miles Edgeworth to be Miles Edgeworth and yet as much of a von Karma as she at the same time; to do so was to threaten to destroy something more intimate, more precious--something indefinable that, all the same, she knew somewhere deep down that she could not afford to lose.)

The next day, for the first time in two years, she turned down his offer of a game. He'd looked at her, board balanced between both hands, expression stoic but disappointment written in the thin curve of his mouth. He shook his head and turned to reshelf it without so much as a word.

Franziska had been abjectly disgusted. He had brought it on himself; and so let him sulk about it by himself. She, on the other hand, would be returning to her studies--dismissing the quiet, sobering realization that for Miles Edgeworth to be alone meant that Franziska von Karma was also absolutely, completely alone.

And yet it was nearly ten years later that the truth finally dawned upon her, sitting on an airplane back to Germany and furiously dabbing at her reddened eyes, all pretenses of perfection and legacy lost.

The entire time, Miles Edgeworth had been letting her win.

---

She had known of Papa's achievements before she had known of Papa himself. They were her lullabies and her fairy-tales as an infant, not yet able to walk, and always weighted with the pregnant pause afterwards that told her that she would be expected of the same. The inheritance of his name alone would never be enough.

A von Karma's perfection extended far beyond their professional ability. A von Karma upheld their prestige with every action in every aspect of their lives they took; walking, speaking, eating, sleeping; the very act of breathing.

She had not been perfect at any of these things. Her first steps had been wobbly and stumbling; the first sounds she had made were much the same gibberish any other child not born of a genius would speak. Flaws every, and from such an early stage.

And as such, she could not recall ever seeing her father until she caught a glimpse of a legal document and _understood._ Four months after her fifth birthday. Suddenly his existence was far more than speculation and the whispers of the nannies; his figure had become the only thing she could see before her, demanding constant attention and reverence. Where he had been too occupied with work before he suddenly had time to personally ensure her instruction was moving properly now.

He spoke before her with knuckles white against the support of his cane. His eyes swerved around the room, and when they met her own she could feel her legs becoming shackled to the ground beneath her. The sound of Papa's voice felt like the weight of iron against her ears as her thumbs dug quietly against the underside of her desk. There was a reverence thick in the room as he perfectly guided their minds and shaped their intellects. It was a house of worship as much as a house of learning.

Sometimes Miles was beside her. Sometimes she was alone. The latter occurred with more and more frequency, as they both grew older.

Franziska had never dared question or voice incomprehension on the more difficult concepts--to do so was to jeopardize the assurance of her prodigal status, which subsequently meant invalidating her right to continue to exist in the eyes of her father. She listened to him speak on courtroom procedure in obedient silence, and spent more nights than she cared to remember ripping tissues apart in her hands as she pored over books that explained the concepts he'd spoken of that she couldn't understand. Her hours of sleep ticked away under the strained watch of a flashlight, concealed beneath the mattress of her bed.

It was a precarious balance. To appear exhausted the next day would raise questions with unacceptable answers. She learned to widen her eyes and remain upright and attentive no matter how much she wanted to slump over in her chair; to contest will against any personal weakness. Naturally, she shouted at Miles for daring to show any hint of his own exhaustion.

He could see through her, of course. He was the only one that ever did.

Inevitably, of course, she was eventually unable to keep teetering balance between family perfection and human fragility, and fell ill for the first time four months within starting her sleepless regiment. Her fingers shook underneath her as she used them to trace lines across the pages of her textbooks, endless rules and policies starting to blend together in a meaningless blur within her mind. Holding her shoulders forcefully rigid, planting one foot in front of the other, old court records pinned underneath both arms. Step after step, she had pushed the doors open to the library and felt the world _sway_, and then the coldness of the floor was pressed against her face the next moment.

She could have died then, she had thought. If anyone else had found her, her play-acting would have been done, and everything would have ended.

"And you call me a fool, Franziska."

Franziska startled into awareness; her hands clutched around blankets instead of old papers and she panicked, nearly tumbling out of the bed. Her struggles did result in her forearm striking the bed stand, and the mug of hot soup flew off the surface and nearly struck Miles in the face.

She had been saved because she had been followed. Because of the _sentimentalism;_ the same sentimentalism she had been trying to stamp out from him since as long as she had known him. She began to mentally mark down plans for the months of corrective lectures she would have to give him in order to reverse the infuriating vindication he was undoubtedly gloating in.

"Stay down," he said. "You have a fever. You're in no condition to be walking around. I have no idea what you thought you were playing at."

"Stay down?" she repeated, incredulous. "Who do you think you are? I am a von Karma! I am a prodigy! I do not _stay down_, not for any reason, not for any excuse, and hardly for the likes of a fool like you!"

"Franziska," Miles said, not ungently.

She stopped.

He bent down to pick up the fallen mug, and turned it over in his hands with a bemused expression. "Wait here," he said, standing, with the clear intention to refill its contents. "Your levels of expressive violence never do cease to amaze."

She seethed. But she waited, nonetheless.

What followed after that was one of the most surreal periods of Franziska's life.

The question of falling behind in their studies, for reasons of illness or otherwise, did not exist. The familiar, leather bound stack of books would remain beside her, even if she lacked the strength to carry their weight. And so Miles took the liberty of doing it on her behalf--reading the text to her, line by line, and over the top of his head she was able to see the sun make its arc across the sky from either horizon to the sound of his voice. To listen to a person speaking and counting the minutes to the beat of that sound was to fall into trance--the visage of which would remain with her for a long, long time to come.

She closed her eyes as Miles sounded out the word _perjury_ over the top of her head, and slept well for the first time in what seemed forever.

The next day, she took a few stubborn, yet wobbling steps out of the bed, feet small and bare and white against the rich carpet. She gripped onto the bedside table for support, lips pursed in angry determination, and she slapped Miles's hands away from her when she felt them touch her arm to steady her further.

"I'm fine," she said shortly. "I'm not an invalid."

He got a strange, sly smile on his face then; Miles opened his mouth to answer with some smart remark, but when Franziska hit him in the face with a pillow, he relinquished and let her go. She wished he hadn't.

Afterwards, they had worked out the secret system between them, which even Papa or his attendants were not privy to; the ones and twos in hours of sleep and recovery that she stole from the day as he kept watch, advising that the mistress not be disrupted from her studies, and was not to be bothered. Her hands had stopped shaking, and she no longer had to press them against the folds of her skirts to keep them convincingly still.

Keep the flashlight on at during all hours of the night to earn one's keep for one more day the next morning. Those stolen hours were her recourse for breathing, with Miles standing guard just beyond the door.

Ah, she thought, standing across from him in an airport in America, under his steady gaze--uncompromising, but not ungentle--and weeping bitterly.

You're the reason I'm alive.


	2. shatter

**part two: shatter**

She didn't know her mother's name for a long time; her mother, whose absence was as eternal and accepted a factor in her life as Miles's presence. Walking along the halls of the estate, eyes flickering past the rows of old portraits and photographs, she was able to identify those in her father's line by face and accomplishments down to centuries past. She could not recognize her mother.

She never asked her father about it. A von Karma did not ask questions, for it was expected that they already had all of the answers.

And yet she could not say in honesty that this fact bothered her that much. What was never there could not be missed, and the existence of a mother was not a necessary burden for a prodigy to bear.

So it had confused her, the night when she had learned of the suicide of Miles Edgeworth, when she woke up far before the break of dawn with the word _mother_ on her lips and an unfamiliar ache deep in her chest.

---

But the truth of it was that she'd known everything had begun to fall apart long before that. She had seen each distortion of the way things were meant to be, the way things had always been, unfold before her eyes--but found herself powerless to stop it. She was a little girl watching her world rust and disintegrate and was left to count her blessings; first on both hands, and then left only with one, and then clenching her fists around emptiness and wondering how everything could have come to this.

Shortly after the bar exam and Miles Edgeworth's first spectacular sham of a trial, he had left the house with little in the way of announcement. She could remember that day--the same routine before their knowledge of law had been canonized, slipping on shoes and moving to his room to collect him for morning lecture (there would always be lecture; there would always be lessons, so long as there was Papa, and Papa was eternal)--and had found that he was gone.

She had stood in his abandoned room, playing chess games alone, reading to an empty bed, clutching the glass frame that held her certification as public prosecutor. She could not help thinking that she had traded one for the other, and as shameful as it was, she could not quiet the voice begging for someone to let her take it back.

He had moved not particularly far away; in a modest apartment only a few blocks from the old mansion. She could not help thinking (wishing) that he had done it out of consideration for her. Nonetheless, she was there often, checking on him and making sure he was continuing to fall in line, as an elder sister ought. She expected that without her guidance he would fall apart in a matter of hours, really. It was one of the fundamental truths upon which her world was built.

The first time she had stepped into his apartment she had left him with a three-page long, perfectly organized list of what exactly was wrong with his arrangement of personal items and where exactly he needed to replace them. On her next visit she'd added another four pages, in neatly spaced columns; certainly too professional and elaborate to have been written by someone merely trying to fabricate a sufficient excuse to see another person.

"This is disgusting," she had said. "Disgraceful. Despicable. Unacceptable." Her fingers had tightened against his, unreciprocated, as she pointed out with the other hand everything he had done wrong.

He answered, softly, as a mantra: "All right, Franziska."

As far as she knew, he never bothered following the written instructions--but she knew where he kept them, pinned to the wall over his desk where he could look at them at anytime and, perhaps, smile. When she told herself that, it didn't seem so terrible that he now thought himself capable of discarding her advice.

They continued to play at that game: far-away household, far-away family, far-away brother, distant but still pretending to be just as close--for a few weeks. That was all they had to establish their new rules, before Papa had met her in a lonely corner of the house and informed her to begin to have the attendants pack her things in preparation for her taking leave to Germany. Her eyes had widened. She dared to retreat a half-step and let herself gasp.

Her father wanted her to begin her career (life) as prosecutor, as he had, in the home country--to further mold her in his image and better initiate her into the practice of fulfilling the expectations that had already defined every aspect of her existence. When he had finished speaking the words, she felt a strange twist in the bottom of her stomach; a reluctance, an extra half-second of hesitation that could have been fatal. Ordinarily, it was understood that for her father to wish her to take leave to Germany simply meant that she was _taking leave to Germany_, and there was nothing beyond that--but she found herself only staring when she was called upon to answer.

She would not openly deny him. That would be tantamount to suicide. And yet--

Franziska closed her eyes; crossed her fingers beneath her sleeves, and prayed.

There was little point in pretending there was any ambiguity to be had in why she found herself reluctant, perhaps for the first and only time, to follow her father's orders. She had nodded, outwardly obedient as she had always been, and left quickly afterwards for Miles's apartment, breathless and shaking and counting each step to keep herself steady along the way.

It was so hard, already, to pretend nothing had changed with the distance of a few blocks; she could not fathom the distance between borders, the distance of an ocean; the distance at which she would be left alone with no one but herself and the shadow of her father, once and for all. For the first time in her life, she let the ground beneath her give way to irrational thought and irrational hope. If she could see Miles now, surely he would say something--surely he would, against all logic, reassure her that he would still be there and that an ocean was as nothing after all.

Franziska von Karma, during those moments, had considered herself sufficiently _grown up_ to not fall under any traps set for the naïve; cynical enough to mock those who supported themselves on blind trust. She did not begin to wonder, until a few years had passed and she had read the American news for reports of trial after trial run by legal star Prosecutor Miles Edgeworth, if her father might have been relieved to remove the _extraneous_ from his way; sent safely thousands of miles across the sea to quietly uphold the von Karma name while he was at last able to focus his attentions on perhaps the only thing he had, in his own twisted way, ever truly cared about.

During these moments of grappling with loss and despair and the borderline of something like grief, none of this had occurred to her--she was thirteen years old and still bound in a girl's body and a girl's dress and rapping sharply on Miles's door with a girl's tiny white knuckles. She was still single-minded in her drive to continue clinging to that one precious thing--perhaps she wasn't entirely unlike her father in ways she had never imagined.

Miles did not answer immediately; but she could see a light illuminating his study through the window, and entered without bothering to wait for him. It was natural for a big sister to have the unquestioned right to enter her little brother's space. As always, Miles hadn't protested, simply slipped the key into her hands and went on about his business, distant to the world surrounding him. All right, Franziska.

It was much the same as it had been the last time she was here. She would have to give him a stern talking-to again. Crossing into the study, she saw no immediate sign of him--but she knew he was there regardless. Perhaps because she needed him to be; and he had never failed her before when it came to being whatever it was she had needed.

The desk in the study was in an unorganized mess. She had never seen it in such a state before. The drawer was pulled half-open; papers were scattered everywhere--the pen laid uncapped and abandoned above a sheet, inscribed with the single word _To._ A letter from outside partially unfolded to the left. It was only half-drawn from the sleeve of the envelope; but that was enough for Franziska to see that it was not business-related. The writing was childish, scribbled out in dark pencil.

The feeling that had resembled grief was supplanted with a feeling that resembled fear.

She drew closer. She could see the crease in the corner where Miles had held it; saw the subtle draw of his fingernail against the opening lines.

_It's me. Do you remember? _

She bent closer, staring at the words, close enough to where her breath might have moved them off the page, reading on in slow, heavy deliberation.

_We were friends. I've been worried. Tell me how you've been._

There was a tightness in her throat; she realized that she could not breathe properly.

_Write back. Please, Miles, write back._

A return address; two different phone numbers; an e-mail address. A one-sided promise. She fingers braced against the opened drawer; and her gaze flicked down, briefly, fatally--and she saw rows of them beneath her hands, obscured but there to be re-opened at a moment's notice. Letters upon letters, with the same childish writing, the same pleas--bound with red string and the same soft creases along their margins.

She felt the world shift irrevocably beneath her.

"Franziska?"

Startled, she slammed the drawer shut and leapt back, shoulders nearly colliding with the curtains. She cursed inwardly. Clumsy. Stupid.

But it had hit her with the force of a sledgehammer, and she had been utterly unprepared for it. Regaining her balance, she stared at him, her little brother, as though he were a stranger. She felt light-headed and could not decide if it was because of rage or nausea or something else entirely. Her thoughts spun wildly around her, struggling to process what she had just seen and unlocked--and as she watched Miles approach, felt them settle hatefully, inevitably, into a single sentiment.

How dare you.

Miles crossed the room, passing her by, and sat down at his desk. He paid no attention to the letter lying inches from his right hand, and slid his paperwork towards him. He crossed out the single _To_ as though it were nothing to him; as though she could not see the split second of hesitation and the tightening of his fingers that spoke as well to her as though he had broken down entirely.

How dare you have someone else, when I only have you.

"You should have told me you were coming."

Miles had not noticed her distress; so absorbed was he in his work, in his lingering thoughts of someone outside who was not her. She didn't answer.

"Franziska? Is something wrong?" He looked up, frowning now that the weight of the silence had become too much for anybody to not feel--that same quiet concern. It was the first time she saw it and could have peered through its cracks; smashed it to dust beneath her fists in its hollow falsity.

"Franziska? Are you all right?"

She thought: _I wanted to stay._

She told him: "I'm leaving for Germany tomorrow."

---

The day of Manfred von Karma's conviction on charges of first degree murder, word had spread like lightning through all corners of the legal world. She could not have avoided letting it catch up to her; the news was all-consuming like the blaze of a wild fire, carrying with it the toll of inevitability.

It was an instant that she would carry with her for the rest of her life. She had been sitting alone in the office in Germany, decorated in sleek grays and dusty blues; leather whip strung upon the wall to symbolize the fear and power that came with playing the role of Manfred von Karma's successor; clouds gathering outside that promised later snowfall. A black pen scratching against paper in swift, decisive strokes. The waft of a cup of tea forgotten at her side. Another day in a grayscale haze of countless other identical days.

She had fulfilled her duty as her father's daughter; four years later, there was a perfect list of guilty verdicts to be credited under her name--and thus, and more importantly, his. This current case would, undoubtedly, be little more than an exercise in tedium like so many others. Her nerves were filled with the sensation of its repetition, draining what little color there was to be had in her world to begin with. She had long ago resigned herself to it, and told herself she had embraced it instead.

Then came the timid knock on the door; and the secretary had handed her the newspaper, wrung her hands miserably, and fled before she had the chance to so much as read the headline. The door slammed shut behind her. Another glance down.

She read of Gourd Lake, of DL-6, of Gregory and Miles Edgeworth (could there have been another Edgeworth besides hers? --absurd). Of conviction on account of murder. She saw the photograph of her father, ashen and cold, meaningless phrases scattered around the familiar profile of his sneer. She saw the letters, but did not comprehend the paradoxical words.

For Manfred von Karma's name to be tarnished; for Manfred von Karma to be _gone_, was a basic impossibility. The world could not and did not exist without him at its forefront. She turned slightly, hair falling across her face, and saw still the cast of his shadow stretching alongside the wall.

How ridiculous. He was right here. He always had been. He always would be.

She was not sure how much time had passed; just that her trance had been interrupted by the sound of her cellphone ringing, sharp and jarring against the overbearing silence, and a glance told her that Miles Edgeworth, four years older and four years separated, was attempting to contact her.

The date shone in illuminating numbers alongside his name. New Year's Day--odd, that she could have forgotten. It was quiet, and she listened to the sound of snow falling.

The phone rang on, and on, and on, but she did not answer.

---

It was February, following months of silence and twelve hours after she had called out _mother_, when she had sat down again at her office and smoothed the single note beneath her fingertips. It was not a newspaper this time.

It was his handwriting.

She could trace the curve of each letter with the tip of her index finger; the sharp, decisive cross of the _t,_ the subtle curve along the bottom of the _s_. The weight of each black stroke against paper that combined to form the shape of his name. The note he had left behind in his office, two months after both of them had lost the man they were trained to think of as a god.

The forensics lab had not needed her help. Miles Edgeworth had left more than enough hand-signed and written documents in his four years of prosecution to confirm the authenticity of a thousand suicide notes he may have left behind. But she had wanted to see it for herself. To be _certain._

_Suicide_. How stupid, how base, how _foolish_--the pinnacle of weakness and sentimentalism. Papa would have been ashamed on his behalf. She _was_ ashamed on his behalf. To top off his previous disgraces against an insect of a defense attorney with this ultimate gesture of fragility was to spit on everything she used to believe they had both learned to hold dear.

They were Papa's words, forming from her lips, speaking through her: to fail is to sentence oneself to death; to fail means you _should_ have died.

The note was composed of a single sentence, surrounded by an empty expanse of blank paper. She had read it to herself over and over until it had lost its meaning; stripped and shattered and rendered hollow--and she was only left with the signature of _Miles Edgeworth._

Franziska von Karma had learned that the emotion of hatred was beneath her; that no other mortal beings on this Earth were worthy of the implicit acknowledgment of equality that came with the investment of such a base emotion. She learned to scorn, to sneer, to laugh and to admonish and to pity. Not to hate.

But the name, strange and alien--_Miles Edgeworth_--evoked now a sensation that flooded everything in her body so that she could not define it as anything beyond hatred. She had been so terrified, as a child, of the threat of his foreign name and its connotation of _other_; terrified that it would provide him a gateway in which to leave her to shoulder the burden of "von Karma" alone. She had been terrified because despite her bravado, she knew that she did not have the strength to face the figure of her father before her, consuming everything, without her brother at her side to tell her _all right._

But he had done something much worse. Something she could never have guessed, that she could not have predicted in fifteen years of harrowing, filtered dreams and paranoia. He had left her, not just with the weight of "von Karma", but with the lingering humanity of a girl clinging desperately to the only person she had ever truly been able to call family.

He had granted her the burden of dream on top of the burden of perfection--an additional burden which she should have excised from herself the moment she had brushed strands of loose dust from her fingertips nearly fifteen years ago.

Unforgivable. And all through the _name. _It was not through uncovering that single bullet that Miles Edgeworth had destroyed the legacy of von Karma.

It was his handwriting.

And the sorrow that she had been fighting back, burning at her throat and her eyes and threatening to tear her apart since the moment she had closed her hands around the piece of paper bearing his signature too much _too much_ in so little time with Papa's shadow and an ocean of distance and nothing left of the darkened mansion strewn with subdued but existent _color_ and the hidden glints of sunlight obscured through curtains that shadowed rows of fallen black kings and dictionaries and a bloody fork gathering dust just beyond their reach--burst from her in a mixture of choking sob and hysterical laughter as the note came apart in her hands.

---

It was after another two months of ensuing static and meaningless noise that she moved on from the ruin and saw clearly for the first time.

There was another rumpled newspaper at her side, filled with red pen and criss-crossed lines that told the story on the re-examination of the case referred to as DL-6. Human beings had a way of being able to step back and assign narrative over their lives. From here, separated, she could understand everything.

She narrowed her eyes; pulling the coat over her shoulders; clenching the handle of the whip between her teeth, armed with a fire in her blood and a _purpose_ that had never existed when struggling to fulfill the expectations of her father.

He was alive.

Lost, disgraced, the burden of shame behind the name of von Karma-- but _alive._ She refused to call it faith, but she had awoken with a frightening certainty that had sparked within her with a life of its own. She had made the familiar calls, the sequence of keys numb now against her skin, and took the responding silence as a sign. Two months, and they had failed to find a body. Two months, and all any of them still had was that note left as little more than a joke in bad taste.

She refused to call it hope. A von Karma does not hope, and Miles Edgeworth was as much of a von Karma as she, even had he lost sight of that path and closed his way to perfection. Papa was still _here_, lingering always, but somehow eclipsed beyond Miles's reach. So the responsibility had been placed upon her.

And so she would find him, and shape him, and avenge both of them upon him for the horrors he had inflicted upon them both by keeping her grasping for that elusive smile.

This was the promise she made to herself as she booked her flight to America--eyes locked on the red circle on the newspaper article that had surrounded the singular name of the one who had taken everything: _Phoenix Wright._


	3. adrian

**part three: adrian**

It had been forty-eight hours, and she had not slept.

Her pen moved in rapid circles beneath the text of the report, in practiced, refined movement. It was familiar; the recollection of it ached against the bones of her hands, though she had not gone through this ritual of painstakingly identifying and correcting her own mistakes in a long time. There had been no need for it; no Papa to remind her that victory was not always synonymous with perfection.

She had let herself falter. It seemed appallingly clear in the aftermath: how careless she had become. The way she had become too accustomed to the ingrained fear and obedience from the officers at her local precinct. The way she had failed to account for every detail and every possibility. This stray line of questioning; that missed opportunity. How she had allowed Phoenix Wright to trick and bluff his way through her perfect cases, and complete his systematic annihilation of what remained of what pride was left within the name of von Karma.

The pen snapped in her hands; she discarded it angrily with a sweep of her arm before opening the drawer to retrieve another. Her fingers still shook.

Her dreams were becoming vivid these days in a way they had not been since she had been a small child. She breathed with Papa's ghost braced against her back, twisted somewhere in the midst of half-recollected apologies. She gazed into the blank frame that marked her place in the line of family portraits. She dreamt of Miles, in a stranger time, a gentler time, that had never really existed--when their laughter had come easily and there was shared warmth whenever she reached up to grasp his hand.

She had wrenched herself forcefully from that particular dream, her palms drenched in sweat, and worked in lieu of daring to risk seeing it again.

But the thing that had surprised her most was that she was still _here._

She had expected something more, somehow--with the familiar sound of the gavel striking down decisively, the harsh, unfamiliar call of _Not Guilty--_she had closed her eyes and clutched at her whip, waiting for the world to begin crashing down around her ears; felt herself shriek and lash out pre-emptively to drown out the sound. Phoenix Wright had collapsed, she had ran, feeling her right to identity fading away beneath each successive step. Her throat had constricted. She had thought she was going to suffocate. She could not remember when she had reached the door of her apartment, shaking off the last of the paparazzi.

And yet, by the next day, she was still there.

It was jarring, almost. She had never been trained, not in thirteen years, of what to truly expect in the aftermath of failure. The concept in itself was unthinkable. Everything was meant to start and stop with the promise of victory. And yet she opened her eyes to the haze of morning sunlight through the curtains; she rose from bed, dressed, ate, reviewed her case files. And with each successive action, she kept half-expecting the earth to fall out from under her feet--and a quiet, inexplicable sort of hysteria built within her every time it failed to do so.

She found herself thinking that this kind of ordinary morning was one that could have only been possible in a world in which Papa was gone.

_Unacceptable._

But if the world would not change with the shockwave on her failure on its own, she had no choice but to accommodate in its stead. The weight of von Karma was her sole burden now, if Papa and Miles were gone, so she could not--she would never be allowed to _fall back._ She had been granted a pardon, somehow, for this, but never again--and there would never be a _need._ It was not too late.

But three months later, the same scene played out within the courtroom. Phoenix Wright smiled, his assistant at his side, as he shook hands in the lobby with his defendant and made small talk--while she felt the world close around her, with the press swarming her from every direction, asking for her thoughts as to her second loss in her lifetime--to _that man,_ the one who had also been the downfall of her father and his _other_ successor. They would not name them, as though they thought themselves clever, speaking in epithets--she forced her way through them and slammed her fists against the courthouse wall, the unmarred brick standing as a testament to her powerlessness as the flash of the cameras went off in her face. The perfect picture of disgrace. A bitterness filled her mouth as she realized she could give them that, if nothing else.

Stupid, _stupid--_she had bit back tears, it had been so foolish; she had been so confident that she had checked every corner, painstakingly swept every detail to ensure the perfection of her case aligned with the evidence and in the ultimate irony that determination had proven to be her new downfall. It made no sense. It wasn't _fair._ She had stunned herself with her own childishness, but found she couldn't bring herself to take it back.

And she had opened her eyes against the light of the next day, grasping futilely for that lost feeling of purpose; the fire of duty in her veins that had sent her returning here in the first place after five years of absence.

But it was gone, long left in tatters at the hands of Phoenix Wright, and she was left with the fragments of a broken dream instead.

She turned another page of the transcript, and gave a small start when she saw the empty surface of the desk beneath it. She had reached the end and inexplicably failed to realize it, and somehow that made the exhaustion she had been fighting off come crashing back against her all at once. Her stomach twisted with it. It was painful when she swallowed.

Franziska realized that it was nearly noon.

_I can't fall back. _

She could not recall the details of the work she had done over the past fifteen minutes. It was static in her mind. She saw she had drawn circles around certain arrangements of words and letters stamped against the surface of the paper, but could not remember why.

_I can't fall._

And suddenly she wondered--in a crazed, blasphemous moment--whether Papa was ever human enough to have been where she was now; exhausted, eyes burning, head swimming, the details of a case melding in against one another in his mind--wrestling with his own youth and human shortcomings. Whether he had ever felt the air being pressed out of his lungs as the shadow of his predecessor closed upon him; whether he had ever faced a stacks of paperwork and would have forsaken it all if only he could have been afforded an hour of rest. If he had ever wished, however briefly, that _perfection_ could be compromised for something as base and pathetic as the need for sleep.

_I can't._

And she nearly began laughing at the sheer absurdity of the idea, and at her own audacity for daring to even entertain it.

She shook her head, trying to clear her mind and stop the edges of the office from blurring. Pulled the last several pages of the transcript in front of herself once again with pen at ready, and tried to convince herself that it was still not too late.

---

She opened the cover of the report.

It was one of many she had received throughout the day about various petty crimes that were to be tried soon in the future. She'd had little to no interest in any of them. This one that had been delivered a scant hour earlier, regarding a murder that had taken place at the Gatewater Hotel, trial tentatively scheduled for tomorrow. The urgency of it told her it was high profile; a glance at the opening page told her that the suspect was a celebrity by the name of Matthew Engarde, charged with strangling fellow actor Juan Corrida to death in his hotel room.

It meant nothing to her--the players involved, the situation at hand; those were insignificant. The only thing she had had to read was the name _Phoenix Wright_, notifying his status as Engarde's attorney, before signing her name onto the document--sealing her next battle.

---

It was an open-and-shut case. She could scarcely fathom what Phoenix Wright was thinking when he had accepted Engarde as a client; the mounds of evidence that continued to stack against him were almost suspect in their decisive volume.

_This time._ She would claim victory, no matter what the means or lengths necessary--she had ordered extensive background checks into each person tied to the case, would sweep the crime scene firsthand, would oversee the forensic investigation personally. She knew now that anything less against the likes of Phoenix Wright would mean disaster.

Matthew Engarde's manager, Adrian Andrews, was a person of particular interest in relation to the incident. Not only was she the one who had discovered the body, but rumors were in circulation about her romantic ties to the victim. Ordinarily she would have dismissed such gossip as irrelevant drivel, but she had learned that Phoenix Wright specialized in somehow spinning drivel into decisive verdicts against her favor.

A quick glance at a case file revealed a sordid history on the part of Andrews, as well. Attempted suicide--a codependency disorder. The photograph included showcased a pale blonde woman, expression frigid and mouth drawn in a thin line, the light reflected on her glasses obscuring a clear view of her eyes. Her cheeks were sallow; she looked half-starved. It had been taken two years ago, amidst a series of intensive therapy sessions after her mentor had taken her own life.

The word _codependency_ stayed with her, looking at this photograph--translating into weakness, of derision, of a woman who was only able to live by chasing the backs of others.

With all of that in consideration, it became obvious that the only thing left to do had been to speak with Andrews herself. She was still being kept in the confines of the hotel, and presumably away from the prying eyes and questions of the media and any other unauthorized personnel--if the people on the force were doing their jobs for once in their incompetent lifetimes.

She was speaking to the detectives when Franziska strode in, back towards the doorway. Her head tilted inquisitively at the new intrusion while the policemen present instantly turned to attention. Franziska glanced amongst them, lips pursed, before jabbing a thumb over her own shoulder towards the empty hallway.

"Out," she ordered.

They obeyed without question, hastily crowding past her through the door and avoiding the side of her belt where her whip was hung. When she and Andrews were left alone in the room, Franziska shut the door behind them. The lock clicked into place with an air of decisive finality, and Adrian Andrews made a small noise of astonishment before turning to face her fully, a card balanced between her fingertips. Her head was raised high, shoulders knotted with unnatural tension; her glasses were slightly crooked on her nose and her makeup could not quite disguise the rings of sleeplessness shadowing her face.

"Adrian Andrews?"

The other woman regained her composure, narrowing her eyes to study Franziska.

"Yes?" She paused. Her tone was airy and noncommittal. "And _you_ are?"

"Prosecutor Franziska von Karma."

Adrian's eyes widened. The hitch of her breath was audible. "Prosecutor…?"

"You know what a prosecutor is, surely."

"Oh--yes, of course. Naturally…" Adrian adjusted her glasses. "I just didn't stop to think…"

"I don't care."

Adrian fell quiet, stricken, and Franziska refused to wait for her to pull herself together again. She lifted her head, moving away from the door and towards the other woman who stood firm at first--but flinched back, at last, as she drew closer.

"I want to make it perfectly clear what it is we're both here for. Tomorrow, during Engarde's trial, you will be called to testify as the one who discovered the body. But before you so much as set foot in that courtroom, we will both be certain as to what it is you will say, how you will say it, and any details you will--_forget_ to mention."

At this, the blonde woman began to say something, mild shock spreading across her features as she realized the implication of Franziska's words. Out of patience, Franziska spoke over her until she became silent and deferential once again.

Franziska felt something almost like disappointment, just for a moment, before brushing it aside.

"To begin with, I want you to give me a personal account of what you know and what you say, in full detail. Leave nothing out." She paused, and then, with steel in her voice: "Start talking."

Adrian stared.

"_Now._"

She made a noise much like a wounded animal.

"Y-yes." Her voice was hoarse. "I… all right."

She let her breath out, shakily, before beginning to speak in a hasty, breathless monotone. Her explanation matched the preliminary reports--how she had been involved with Juan Corrida, had stopped in to see him between her duties as his rival's manager, and discovered him dead in his room. After recovering from her shock, she had contacted the police, and after they had arrived, she had…

Franziska cut her off. "I don't need to hear about what happened after the police arrived. Is there anything else relevant to this case?"

Adrian's head snapped up, startled. Her hands clutched at opposing elbows, and she shivered though it was not cold. "No. No, that's all. I didn't… leave anything out."

"You're certain?" Franziska moved towards her. A twist of panic seemed to flit over the blonde woman's face, and Franziska's eyes narrowed. _A poor liar after all._

"I…"

Adrian's back pressed against the glass of the window. She bit her lip, card spinning wildly between her hands.

_No. Not just a poor liar._

Franziska met her gaze, and watched the other woman fall apart before her, looking away, twisting her hair between her fingers, glancing back through the window behind her as though imploring for it to offer viable escape.

"Adrian Andrews." She flinched at the sound of her name, brittle with cold anger. _Good._

"The body," she burst out. "I stabbed the body!"

Silence.

_A poor excuse for a human, weakly trying to save face._

"Is that a confession to the murder of Juan Corrida?"

"No!" Her eyes widened, horrified. "No, that's not it! I didn't kill him! Matt is the one. But, I just… I wanted to make _sure._ As soon as I saw what had happened, I knew right away… and that's why I did it. Because people… don't understand the person Matt really is. They wouldn't have suspected him, even if he _had_ left traces. But I _knew._ That's why I had to make sure. For the truth. For _her._"

Franziska said nothing.

"I'm sorry."

"Spare me your apologies." Adrian flinched again, pressed on, insistent.

"I know it was wrong. That it was a crime. But it was for her," she repeated. "It was supposed to be for _her_ sake. So until the trial is over, at least…"

Franziska felt her hand brush against the edge of the photo from two years ago and the mirror image of it, now, standing before her--no traces remaining of the woman who had stood coolly before the detectives when she had first entered. She had been so easily broken. Like china. Like, she could not help but think, briefly--like the veneer of perfection and those who dedicated themselves to maintaining it.

"Celeste Inpax," Franziska said, indulging her. The other woman nodded, the sound of her breathing uneven and filled with emotion.

"It's not fair," Adrian said, her hands twisting against each other in misery. "I… loved her so much. She was the only person I had. She was my world. And she left. She was _taken_ from me--by them. They're the reason. It's because of them that she died. It's only right that they finally get what was coming to them--isn't it? The world should know what kind of men they really are." She shivered, eyes and voice filled with pleading that made Franziska's stomach twist in disgust. "Tell me I'm not wrong."

Her left hand rose to her face, obscuring her eyes filling with tears beneath her glasses.

"It _hurts._"

_What do you expect me to do about it?_ She barely kept it restrained against her tongue--the woman was already at her shattering point; any fool with a pair of functional eyes could see that. She moved to turn away, to turn her attention onto more important matters now that her case had this unexpected complication to consider--and felt Adrian Andrews's hand gripped the crook of her arm, keeping her in place.

"Help me," she said, barely a whisper. Her head was lowered. "I don't know what to do."

_She said it._

Franziska felt her lip curl, her thumb relaxing at the base of her whip, a loathing filling her senses towards this woman somehow different from any other she had felt before. It seethed uncomfortably beneath her skin, festering, telling her in no uncertain terms to leave his woman and everything she represented behind.

"All you need to do is as I say," she said, "and Matt Engarde will receive his sentence. That's the only thing you need think about until this trial is over."

She pulled away. Adrian Andrews wept on.

Pathetic.

---

She had discarded the old photograph on her way back to the police station. It was on impulse, while reviewing the case file once again in the car and Adrian Andrews's psychological history alongside it. She had lifted it, looked at the visage of the woman contained within, the gloss of reflection around the edges, and suddenly found herself tearing it into two with one decisive motion.

Franziska could not explain it and did not care to try, but the gesture made her feel almost at ease, just for a moment.

---

But she had left behind something broken, only to find she couldn't bear to face something whole, either.

Her hand had been halfway to her whip, her left foot braced forward, Phoenix Wright's eyes locked on hers, lips drawn into a thin, disapproving line that spoke to her in terms of little girl, angry girl, meaningless girl throwing a girl's tantrum--how dare he, _how dare he--_but when they turned simultaneously to face the sound of _his _voice, Franziska thought for a crazed moment that she could hear both of their breaths hitch; both of their hearts skip a beat.

The world had not collapsed beneath her with her failure, and it did not fall back into place when Miles strode back into her life at the police station as though it were nothing, head held high with an air of confidence and pride he should never have been allowed. There was ringing certainty in every word he spoke, as though he had only truly connected with the absolution of von Karma after abdicating his right to it.

"You haven't changed."

She had been waiting for him; to see this moment had been her entire purpose from the beginning--but she had not been expecting this. Her mouth fell open--foolishly--she heard herself splutter, hand half-raised to seize his arm. His eyes met hers, briefly, before turning away to face Phoenix Wright, and Franziska was left staring at the broad expanse of his back with her fingers closing around emptiness.

"It's been a long time, Wright," he said. Phoenix Wright stared, his hands curling into fists at his sides, his expression a complex tangle of a dozen emotions at once. Miles matched his gaze, coolly--and that sudden feeling of being _outside_; of being a spectator to something beyond her scope was like ice being plunged into her stomach.

"Edgeworth," Phoenix Wright said, at last.

Miles pulled his gaze from Phoenix Wright, and onto her--a casual flick of the eyes, sideways. The informality of it sent her reeling; retreating just enough to know he had noticed.

"What am I going to do with you? Still blaming others when things go wrong?" It was accompanied by an easy smile, one that echoed that same accusation of _little girl, ignorant girl_ that she had seen from Phoenix Wright moments before. It was one she could not recognize from her memories or could have imagined from her visions of this day.

It wasn't supposed to be like this. Not after all that she had been through.

"How dare you!?"

He'd left her with nothing. And she felt, finally, in a way that losing her record had failed to do, in a way that losing Papa had failed to do, something like reality begin to crack beneath her. It was too much and even as she stood and screamed and bleated empty words about victory and legacy and everything she had been trained to do, that they _both_ had, and what else could she do now but repeat and repeat and repeat endlessly and hoped by some miracle they regained meaning--but felt them fall upon two sets of deaf ears.

It was too much. So she ran.

He didn't follow.

---

She dreamt that night that she had discovered a body.

She could not tell precisely who it was; its features seemed to change whenever she tried to get a closer look. But as soon as she took in the scene, she knew what she had to do, above all else: the suicide note, the _suicide note;_ it had been taken, hidden somewhere in this room with Miles's words, Miles's handwriting, Miles finally telling her _why--_

She kicked aside the guitar case in her frenzy; the flower vase shattered into pieces against the floor. Her hands bled against its jagged edges as she slid her nails against the cracks in the floor, desperation driving her forward and on her knees, stripped of all pretense of dignity.

She searched everywhere, tore the room apart again and again. But it was gone. Her eyes roved around the scene once more, searching and digging for a place she could have missed or overlooked, turning furniture over, when her eyes fell once again upon the body and there was _certainty_, cold and hard and etched in vague horror. The one place she had yet to search.

"That's right," she said. "_You_ hid it." Then there was only one thing left to do.

She gripped the handle of the dinner knife--had she been holding it the entire time?--braced her free hand against the armrest of the chair, and drew back her arm--

When she woke, bolting upright and drenched in sweat, hand pressed against her chest where the point of the knife had burst through--she found herself shivering. But it was not cold.

---

She had pushed it to the back of her mind. Miles was right. Nothing had changed. Least of all herself; least of all the resolve that accompanied her name and her blood.

This was what she told herself the following morning, manila folder clasped under her arm, ignoring the extra set of footsteps moving alongside hers--and ignoring the way she caught herself matching her own movement to his, just as they had when they were children.

His arrival had not changed what had to be done in the courthouse; their separation had not changed the way she could not stop herself from slowing down or speeding up to ensure they remained side-by-side. To let physical reality match internal pride and internal symbol. To be a von Karma was to be well versed in the power of both--and it was a comfort, in a way, to fall back on the rule and ritual that she had sworn by since the beginning of everything, when one simply had to memorize the rote and remember to never question.

"There was something I wanted to speak to you about last night, before you ran off," Miles said suddenly, glancing upwards. They slowed their pace by half a step.

Franziska did not answer. Her cell phone had remained untouched since she had first seen the identity of the persistent caller from the night before.

"About the case," he clarified.

"Of course," she answered, irritation biting into the words. He paused briefly again; she thought she might have seen a miniscule shake of the head before continuing to walk.

"It's the Andrews woman," Miles said. "I spoke to her briefly this morning, after looking extensively into her background. Franziska, I think…"

She began walking again, abruptly, not wishing to hear this; breaking a childhood's worth of habits to avoid doing so. She didn't know what he thought he was doing in the first place; suggesting that there was something to _consider_ about her perfect case minutes before they were to enter the courtroom. Disgrace had made him sloppier than she could have conceived, and for once, if he would just follow her, follow _her_, she could show him where things stood between them as they were now.

"Franziska--"

"I don't care what you think, Miles Edgeworth."

He didn't call her on the obvious lie.

And then she inhaled, sharply, as his face blurred and fell out of focus, slid above her line of sight to be replaced by black pavement and the outline of her own gloved hands braced against it.

"_Franziska!_"

The world fell back into focus all at once at the crack of his voice--harsher and more piercing, somehow, than the crack of the gunshot that had preceded it. She saw him rush to her; felt his arms fly around her, pulling her behind him and pulling both of them against the cold brick of the courthouse for cover all at once.

She heard the wail of police sirens and saw men in police uniforms forming a semi-circle around them. Miles was speaking into a cellphone--his grip on her tightened when her knees began to give way from under her--_no, not like this--_and then he was dragging her, even with her heels digging against the pavement stubbornly, protesting even as she heard him say, in the interjections between her own shrill voice, "_Hospital;_ you've been shot--absolutely out of the question--stop fighting me, Franziska!"

_I can't._

"Let go!" she was screaming as she hadn't for at least five years now; pulling at him with her good arm, nails raking into his sleeve, sending lines of fabric trailing after his wrist like streamers. "Let go! Let go! Let go of me!"

He laid his hand over hers--it was _warm--_she held back a sob, as he glanced upwards and pulled her towards him, against the cover of his coat to shield against the incoming rain. This was wrong, this was not how it was meant to be, this was not why she had come here, not to keep leaning on him and clinging to his back and relying on him to stay standing, this was not acceptable, she could not--not with the sting of cold rain beating down on her shoulder and the strange mixture of red ribbon strands entangling against the mud at her feet if she could ever prove that she could not walk in his shadow it was _now_ why couldn't he understand that, that this was what she _needed,_ why couldn't he just--

"_Let go!"_

He shook his head.

Her shoulder was throbbing, in time to the rapid pounding of her heart, filling her with dizzy hysteria but draining her of the strength to fight for it. She gripped at him, hard enough to _hurt_, but it still did not deter him.

He was the one who was lost, after all. He was the one who needed her to guide him. He was her little brother. He was the one person she could help. He was the one thing she had left.

He was--

She heard the voice of Adrian Andrews, suddenly, with a clarity that left her staggering, her legs finally giving out from under her and darkness engulfing her vision.

_--my world._

---

It was a cold rain outside. The rhythm of it beat against the windows, casting the walls of the hospital room into dull grey. She had been left alone and left behind, again.

And there it was--the same. He'd been lying to her all along. She had been lying to herself all along.

The emptiness that came with that understanding settled comfortably against her chest--where it had always belonged--as she reclined her head against her pillows. It had been naïve of her, _sentimental _of her, to think that something as vital as a difference in name could have been overlooked and forgiven.

She switched on the television, curious despite herself as to the proceedings of the trial that should have been _hers_. The courtroom looked to be in a frenzy, and--there. Miles Edgeworth, knuckles white as he braced them against the edge of his podium, and Phoenix Wright facing him, mouth set in a grim and determined line. Engarde's expression was neutral in the defendant's chair near his side, the back of his hand braced against the underside of his chin.

And then the sight of Adrian Andrews' tearstained face filled her vision.

_Help me,_ she was mouthing. At no one in particular--but her gaze was focused at the camera, towards an audience, towards the silent room where she lay with a bullet lodged in her shoulder and the white gloss of the hospital surrounding her on all sides.

Franziska's fists clenched around the hospital gown, hating the helplessness it represented, hating the burning sensation building behind her eyes, hating the gnawing feeling that refused to leave her completely when she stared into the image of the other woman; hating the way it recalled to her the previous day when she had made a promise of victory to Adrian she had been unable to keep and hating most of all that she knew that she was now responsible for the sight of her weeping and pleading on the screen for the world to see.

It was absurd. Absurd. No, something far worse than absurd.

_Pathetic. _

She shut the television off.

---

She was dreaming again. When had she allowed herself to fall asleep, under the scent of tulips, grasping at them for their splash of color against the slate grey of the room? She remembered hazily that she had resolved herself to stay conscious, to carefully watch the live broadcast of the trial of State vs. Engarde, to ignore her own exhaustion and the painful throbbing of her right shoulder and the humiliating memory of the discarded bandages stained with her blood. Strange that she would have succumbed so easily, without so much as a struggle.

She opened her eyes against her dream.

A nurse was speaking--Franziska shook her head, trying to focus--telling her that she had received a call.

"Adrian Andrews?" she asked, groggily.

The nurse blinked. "No, ma'am." Franziska frowned, momentarily bewildered--the nurse went on to explain, nervous, black receiver held between both hands, that it was in fact from a man named Miles Edgeworth from the courthouse lobby. He had insisted that it was urgent and that he had to speak to her _now_ as a matter of life and death--

Like nails against a chalkboard.

"I'm not accepting any calls," she said. "Tell him that."

"_Franziska_." His voice called out from the receiver. Faint, but audible. "I know you're there. Pick up."

The nurse looked at her, imploring. She hesitated. The weight of the receiver felt unnaturally heavy against her hands.

"Why are you contacting me now, Miles Edgeworth?" Her voice was steadier than she had been afraid of. "You've a trial to run. Surely even someone on the level of your incompetence hasn't managed to lose already." Fingers pressed lightly against the buttons of the television remote--meaningless commentary by brainless fools while court was in recess. A replay of Adrian Andrews pale and shaking against the witness stand.

"You know that isn't the case. I need your help."

There was a faint twist against her stomach. _Now, of all times._

"I know you've been watching the trial." She opened her mouth to reply, angrily, but he cut her off, impatience biting into his voice. "We're losing ground. If things continue as they are, Engarde will be acquitted and Adrian Andrews accused in his place."

Her lip curled in derision; in something approaching self-loathing. _Good._

"I don't--"

"Don't tell me you don't care." Sharply.

She didn't. He continued to speak, his voice terse, in low, forced control. She realized with a start that he was afraid.

"Listen carefully. Detective Gumshoe reported that he had acquired more evidence that could be of use in the trial, but the fool has managed to wreck his vehicle on the return journey." He exhaled, and as he spoke, she could picture him, index finger pressed against his temple, brow creased, mouth thinned to a line across his face. The same. It always was. "We have no other recourse to track his location other than you. The entire trial is depending on this. So I'm asking you, as a fellow prosecutor--please, lend us your assistance."

He paused, waiting for her answer.

She closed her eyes. The phone rattled against her ear with the trembling of her hands. She could see herself, back turned, leaving behind the ruins of the case against Engarde and with it her final revenge against the man she had called brother for so long; she could feel the wind against her back and the ground beneath her feet as she walked away, once and for all, never mind Phoenix Wright, never mind Miles Edgeworth, never mind Adrian Andrews.

It would be so easy. She had already decided, long ago.

"Franziska?"

Her eyelids rose, and she felt the cool fabric of the hospital bed sheets against her skin, the bandages tight around her shoulder, and heard the promise hanging between his voice and her own. And _hers_.

It wasn't too late. She was needed.

She answered: "Yes."

---

A happy ending.

It wasn't right, it didn't _fit_--for von Karmas, there were no happy endings. Miles Edgeworth knew this as well as she did. But he was smiling. They all were.

_It's over._

She had not been sure what she expected to feel after the guilty verdict had been passed. Relief, maybe. Accomplishment. A shadow of everything she had lost in her struggles against Phoenix Wright over the past year. But when she had seen them laughing and embracing in the lobby--treating defeat as though it had been victory--every sense of what she understood about what _was_ and _should_ be fell to pieces around her once again.

To bring the evidence to the courtroom--to convict Matt Engarde and save Adrian's life--meant to defeat Phoenix Wright, finally, and to show Miles Edgeworth he needed her guidance after all.

"The truth," Miles had said. Phoenix Wright had nodded. She was the only one there, it seemed, who could not follow; who had not unlocked the secret.

So she had fled, away from them and away from everything once and for all, the way she should have done from the beginning. Nothing mattered anymore. She had left her whip behind, pushing past the others crowding in the lobby to reach the doors showing the way to her escape.

"Franziska!"

She stopped, as though a noose had closed around her neck.

"Franziska…"

She recognized the quaver in the voice, and wondered if it was worth the effort to turn around. Ignored the uncomfortable tightness in her chest, the strange way her eyes flitted downwards, the vague burning sensation in the back of her throat. There was a word for this, she knew, but she couldn't recall it to mind, and if it was this terrible just _hearing_ then to turn around and look was nigh unthinkable.

"…Miss von Karma?" More hesitantly. A shift in word choice; more formal, more acceptable. She could hear the wordless precursor behind it: _Was that wrong?_ _Are you angry? Show me how to do it right. Show me how to speak. Show me how to breathe._ She felt a twist of something like nausea; held back the taste of bile gathering in her throat. Her face contorted with it, out of the other's sight.

Papa, are you angry?

She used it to lace her words with venom. "What do you want?"

But somehow it failed to drive her away. And now two footsteps, soft and faltering. She tensed with the need to compensate for the lost distance between them. Harshness had not deterred her--why did they have to be so persistent about clinging?

_(she tightened her grip on miles's hand)_

She was in no mood or condition to deal with this. Her shoulders were still trembling from the force with which she had discarded her whip. Not now. She couldn't support the weight of her own name and the expectations that came with it, let alone carry someone else's--not standing like this on the precipice of her own failure. The thing to do was tell her so, in no uncertain terms.

But Miles never had.

She listened to the intake of breath, so close too close behind her back. _I am not your pillar. _

She waited for the pleading.

"Are you all right?"

Franziska looked back.

Her hand was half-outstretched towards her, tentative, concerned. Too close.

"I heard," she said. "About what happened to you outside the courthouse. I was--worried."

"I'll survive," she answered.

"I'm glad," Adrian said. "I'm so glad."

They fell silent.

"I also wanted to thank you."

Franziska raised her eyes to meet hers, brow furrowed, not understanding.

"For everything," Adrian clarified. She managed a weak, watery smile. "If you hadn't been there, I don't know what I would have done. I was so afraid of everything--myself, even. What I had been, what I was turning into. But… because you were there, I was able to keep going. Because of Mr. Edgeworth, and Mr. Wright, and you, I feel like I can finally start over." An awkward, self-conscious laugh, filtered with the fear of rejection--but struggling for the strength to keep it at bay.

Franziska stared. Adrian stepped towards her.

"Stop," she said; but it came out voiceless, past Adrian's ability to hear. But the other woman hesitated, retracted--as though she had understood even without the benefit of sound.

"Thank you," she said again, and her smile broadened, too subtly for a frail wisp of a woman, too kindly for anyone who had broken down and confessed that she could never carry on with her own strength alone. Franziska knew this more than anyone else. But somehow, she still dared.

It was not a perfect smile.

It was nervous, one awkward from lack of use. The corners of her mouth jerked and shifted; her eyes darted nervously from her face and to the ground and back up again, unable to maintain consistent eye contact. Her nails dug tense marks into the skin of her hands, braced awkwardly against her chest. It was far from perfect.

But Franziska could not help but think it was a good one all the same.


	4. franziska

**part four: franziska**

It seemed to her, as she forced her way through its halls - to a gallery of indignant exclamations and bewildered stares - that everything in the airport was cold. The walls and the floor alike were frigid even through the thin barrier of her gloves and her boots, as well as the touch of the waves of people crowding against her in their hurry to go their own ways. And coldest of all was the feel of the thin card beneath her fingers - her ticket back to Germany.

She moved forward in a daze, guided by the dimly lit signs and the echoes of the awkward words of thanks given by a broken woman who had somehow managed to be reborn.

Not everyone could be so lucky.

She was thinking this as she heard the pace of her own footsteps slow--as though they were someone else's--felt the brush of air against her skin as she turned at the sound of Miles's voice.

"Where are you going, Franziska?"

They spoke. It was quiet reiteration of the lofty concepts he had spoken of at the courthouse--justice, truth, _pride,_ a twisted sort of pride she could not connect with in spite of pride being what had defined her life for nineteen years.

"You don't understand _anything_!" she shouted, and the wild hysteria fuelling the outburst knew that it wasn't Miles she was addressing.

_I can't do it._

"You can," he said, and his voice was firm.

She stared, and the realization hit her at once--the difference between then and now; then when they had been surrounded by others in the aftermath of Engarde's conviction and now when there was only a faceless crowd. He was speaking to _her_. For the first time, she thought, and something inside of her crumbled.

"I…"

He waited.

"I am Franziska von Karma," she said.

He smiled, softly. It was finally the one she could recognize back from the simpler times under the roof of her father--the quiet warmth she had always reached for, that had always been _there,_ every other time she had been surrounded by cold. The one that had been telling her all along that he would wait.

She wept.

---

It was the first time she had visited her father's grave. There had been no real funeral; the only people who might have been willing to mourn him had been his children-- but the two daughters and the foster son had all chosen to hide themselves in separate corners of the world rather than pay their respects. The grave was bare except for his name. Franziska thought it was appropriate in a way, looking at the letters etched upon stone--perhaps the most suitable memorial for him possible.

It was late evening. Her breath formed mist before her eyes. She was alone--something she had never thought she would be able to say, not in earnest, not carrying her family name. It was strange in a way that her first impulse had been to come to this place, when faced with the prospect of moving apart from he and his teachings to find her own answer.

_My own answer._

Her mind had been in a blank as she had made her way here. It was the first time she had allowed herself to frame it in those terms. It was terrifying. It was standing against the edge of a cliff dropping into an empty abyss and knowing that she was expected to throw herself off.

"I don't know what to do." She spoke the words aloud, quietly, her nails digging into the handle of her whip, chest tight with her own helplessness. "I don't know where to start."

She thought back, once again, to her life--a life spent memorizing rules that had been set and framed from the very beginning when she had first opened her eyes and taken in the world around her. There had been no such thing as searching or epiphany or self-realization. She had never had to face uncertainty like this--understanding, finally, that in wrapping herself in the blanket of perfection, she had shut everything else out.

She had spent her entire life running.

"Papa," she said, finally, "I don't know how to _live._"

There was no answer, of course.

As she stared at his final epitaph, cold and barren, she realized why.

_Neither did you._

She relaxed her hands, kneeling to set the arrangement of flowers against the stone. She knew that her father would scorn at such a gesture--but seeing them settle there, quiet bursts of color against the shape of his name, it felt as though something missing throughout both of their lives was slowly falling into place. She brushed her fingers over the petals, and felt the first chapter of her life quietly and irrevocably come to a close.

She thought of the black and white of absolutes that her father had so believed in, had so desperately and unforgivingly passed onto his successors. Her memories of her father were etched in shades of filtered gray.

"There are no easy answers, are there?"

What did she feel for her father in the end?

She had no answer for that, either.

She stood there, lost amidst herself, standing at the axis of a dozen crossroads--when her heart nearly burst from her chest when her phone began to ring from the pocket of her coat. The sharp sound dragged her forcefully back to reality. Flustered, she pulled it out--equal parts annoyed and equal parts relieved--and glanced at the caller ID.

It wasn't a number that she recognized--and from America, no less. She answered anyway, trying to shake off her disorientation, though she couldn't think of any stranger from there who had reason to contact her.

"This is Franziska von Karma."

The voice on the other hand was filled with the uncertainty that came with hope. "Franziska?"

She nearly dropped the phone. It was Adrian Andrews.

"You said it was all right to call," Adrian said. She measured her words out carefully. Franziska had the impression that she had rehearsed this long before dialing. "I'm sorry. If I'm being a bother…"

"You aren't," Franziska answered. Quickly--perhaps too quickly. She felt herself tense.

It was another thing she had never learned how to do--make small talk, whether over the phone or anywhere else. She had always prided herself on her businesslike mannerisms, on wasting no time on such silly contrivances. But now--

"How are you, Franziska?"

"Fine." She was standing over her father's grave. "Yourself?"

"I'm… all right, too." She was locked away in prison with a half-year sentence before her.

Franziska hesitated. It had been impulse--scribbling her phone number on a scrap of paper before she stepped on the plane, thrusting it at Miles, telling him quickly--a part of him hoping he didn't catch the words properly--to give it to Andrews. Sitting on the plane, she remembered thinking that the paper hadn't torn quite as easily as Adrian's old photograph. She wondered now if she had made a critical mistake.

"Did you need something?"

"No… nothing in particular. It's just that…" There was a quiet hum as Adrian audibly searched for the right words.

"What?"

"I just… wanted to call." She sounded apologetic. "That's all, really."

Franziska stood, turning to face away from the field of graves. Her throat tightened with irritation--the logic behind Adrian's claim was lost upon her. Foolish, sentimental, a waste of everyone's time--

She remembered the phone ringing, glowing with Miles's number, the night she heard that Papa had died. She had come so close to answering.

"Franziska? Are you… are you there?"

"I don't mind."

Adrian's surprise reverberated through the receiver. "I'm sorry?"

"I don't mind," she repeated--it was easier the second time. "That you wanted to call."

"I'm…" The other woman swallowed. "I'm glad."

"I have to drive back now. You… can call again later, if you wish."

Quietly, gratefully: "I will."

She hung up with the press of a button, and felt herself exhale. Felt the rush as the edge of the cliff above disappeared from her view as she moved forward, even still uncertain as to where.

---

Germany was much the same as she had left it.

This was another thing that should have startled her in its normalcy, that the office welcomed her back even after knowing full well of her failures in America. But the surprise she felt as she stepped through its doors as though nothing were wrong (nothing _was_ wrong, a part of her chided) was more weary than anything. She had learned that there were shades to such things as resignation.

"It's been chaos without you here, Prosecutor," the Chief said. She shrugged him off, annoyed at his statement of the obvious. It didn't surprise her. In a way, it was reassuring--even when the stacks of backlogged paperwork made their way to her desk, filled with errors and misfiles and shameful sloppiness all around. There was work to be done, punishments to be meted out. This corner of her life had managed to remain relatively stable.

After all, what she thought she had known of pride had been broken, so the only thing she had was work, and Miles's promise of a new answer hanging somewhere indefinable in the distance.

But even trying to lose herself once again, her mind drifted back to the chilly evening in the graveyard.

Adrian Andrews had called again a few days later. Franziska had been in the middle of dissecting an extremely tedious report—things had deteriorated to a worse state than she'd feared without her watch—and had brushed her off rather harshly. Adrian had been in midsentence when Franziska had left her to an empty ringtone. It was nearly a week before she tried again--considerably more hesitant than the first time, but persistent nonetheless.

She never seemed to call with any subject in mind in particular to talk about. Every time, she just wanted to call. Chat casually. Make small talk. A few times, she admitted, as apologetic as ever, that she was simply lonely.

It was like swallowing glass. Listening to the weight of each pause, straining for the appropriate words--she thought, several times, throughout the first few weeks of stilted conversation, that it would have been better if she had never given Adrian the offer of consultation at all. She had made her mind up to tell her to stop calling at least three times in a single day, but when the phone rang and Adrian's voice came through on the line, she found her resolve, inexplicably, withering.

For her part, Adrian seemed to adjust accordingly to the long stretches of silence--to waiting for several minutes for a curt reply. She had a way of catching Franziska off guard with the simplest questions, out of nowhere, that she had no real answer for and found herself feeling all the more foolish for it.

She had found herself structuring much of her day and the pace of the work around the times of those phone calls. Five minutes in between reports. Ten minutes between reviewing salaries. She found herself learning to take breaks for the first time in her life. To eat her meals with some measure of trained calm, with both hands, as opposed to one still clutching a pen and scribbling madly over the latest updates on the court records.

It was Monday night. She had just returned home from the office, had barely managed to lock the apartment door shut behind her, when the phone began to ring.

"What do you like to do with your spare time, Franziska?"

Franziska grimaced as she pulled her gloves off of her hands. "I make it a point to have as little spare time as possible."

A _hmm_ sound echoed from the receiver, contemplative and vaguely disapproving. "I don't think that's very healthy." A pause. "Is it?"

Franziska snorted, balancing the phone between her ear and her right shoulder.

Adrian was quiet for a moment before adding, "Being where I am, it's about all I have."

"Naturally." In truth, Franziska had never really considered it--the activities of inmates inside their prison cells, how they passed the time, what dreams they drew upon, surrounded by gray walls and fellow criminals. It was a sobering, uncomfortable thought. "What do you do, then?"

"Reading, mostly."

"Reading?"

"It's one of the only things you really can do." Pause. "You know, I was actually trying to reread some Dumas, but found I didn't care for it particularly anymore. Funny, isn't it?"

_Dumas._ Franziska wracked her brain, but the name wasn't familiar.

"I see." It was the only thing she could say.

"So the past few days I've been reading Les Miserables instead--it's another old favorite of mine."

She shifted uncomfortably in her chair. "I see."

"Have you read it, Franziska?"

She had suspected Adrian had been leading up to this, but hoped she wouldn't--from Adrian's tone of voice she could tell that it was something she _should_ have read, something that any normal person would have read and recognized the name of immediately.

"No. I haven't."

"It's very good. I really recommend it." Adrian's voice was light, as though Franziska hadn't just admitted the shameful deficiency on her own part. The world continued to turn. Franziska swallowed. "It's a classic. I'm sure any library in your area would have a copy…"

Franziska expected her reply to come out resigned. But as she spoke, the words seemed to carry something else to her ears; something she could not quite identify, just yet.

"I'll check it out."

---

Wednesday afternoon. A small break in between reports. Franziska held her phone in one hand, nursing a fresh cup of tea with the other. A copy of Les Miserables was propped against the side of her desk, the corners of several pages creased with stopping points.

"I finished the book."

Adrian's voice was eager. "And?"

"It was… all right." She turned in her chair, eyes flitting downward to the streets of pedestrians moving in waves on the streets. "For a make-believe story involving the foolish actions of a bunch of fools, I suppose."

Adrian made a rather contemplative click of the tongue. "Did you watch the musical?"

"Yes, I did." Adrian had suggested it a few days ago and had praised the production at length. Franziska had been skeptical at best, but found herself making her way to a local video shop to obtain a copy anyway. "It was utterly ridiculous."

Adrian laughed softly. "You know, I thought you'd say that."

_Then why did you ask me to see it? _

She found she had to suppress a smile regardless. "Am I that predictable?"

"It's not that! Just… you don't seem like the type to care much for musicals. Maybe regular theatre… Well, in any case, I thought I'd give it a try with you anyway."

_I don't seem the type?_

"But you enjoy them."

"Yes, I do. You know, when Celeste was first starting out, she told me that the first job she managed to land her client was a role on Les Miserables. It was a bit part, but…"

_What do you enjoy about such nonsense?_

Enthusiasm audibly rising, she continued to talk at length about Celeste Inpax and her own experience with stage productions. Eventually, as she always did, Adrian said goodbye--with a cheerful promise to call again tomorrow. Returning to her work, and feeling inwardly as though she had just passed a trial by fire, Franziska marveled.

---

Friday evening. The phone had rang unexpectedly as she was reviewing the evidence list for her next case. Paperwork surrounded her in almost all directions; she could scarcely move her elbows to answer the phone without knocking something over.

"I'm busy, Adrian," she said.

"Oh--" She faltered. "I understand. I'll… talk to you later, then."

"Yes," Franziska said, "Later."

She meant it.

---

Tuesday morning. Breakfast had not quite settled in her stomach. She had been halfway in the midst of slipping on her jacket--the autumn air had been growing crisper these days. The left sleeve of it hung loose against her back as she flipped open the phone.

"Hello." The sleeve fell unadorned again--something was different. There was a subtle tremor contained within the greeting; Franziska wondered for a moment, selfishly, if anyone else would have caught it. "It's morning there, isn't it? How are you?"

"All right. What's the matter?"

"Nothing's the matter!" The forced cheer came out shrill enough for Franziska to pull the phone a few inches from her ear. "Nothing could be better, really."

Franziska frowned. She pulled the jacket off entirely and set it back on the hook. It took a moment for her memory to jog properly, before the significance of today recalled itself and account for Adrian's strange demeanor--for a moment, something twisted inside her for having forgotten so easily. She reached out to draw back the curtain to the nearest window, and saw the morning sky was clear through it.

"It's the day of your release, isn't it."

Adrian had been in midsentence--something about the weather, empty, jittery filler conversation that even now Franziska had little patience for--and fell quiet.

"Adrian."

"Yes." Her voice was small. "I'm back in my apartment now."

It was the first time for months that Franziska thought back to the cowering woman she had first encountered back in Los Angeles, wretched and searching for the guidance of anyone willing to give it to her, grasping at her with hands that had stabbed a corpse in the name of vengeance.

"Franziska, I…" There was a soft _thud_ in the background; had she dropped something? Collapsed? "I don't know what to do. Where do I start now? How do I start again now, after everything that's happened? I _can't…_"

Franziska closed her eyes. She felt herself giving voice to an echo. "You can."

She heard the sharp intake of breath on the other line. Franziska waited.

"Yes," Adrian answered. Her voice was steadier now. "Thank you."

---

Sunday night. The phone rang. Franziska sat up in bed, a bit of irritation in the motion as she glanced at the clock--_two in the morning?_--and picked up the phone, wondering what predicament Adrian must have gotten herself into to dismiss her usual consideration of the time difference. It had been several months since her release, and she had managed to do quite well for herself--recently, she recalled, being hired to host an art exhibit--but there were still times when she seemed to be on the verge of breaking down over the phone in a fit of frenzied insecurity.

"This is Franziska. What is it?"

The voice that answered was not Adrian's.

Miles said, "Franziska, I need you to meet me in Los Angeles."

Her eyes widened, then narrowed. "What's this, all of a sudden?"

He deftly brushed aside her question. His voice was oddly constricted. "By tomorrow morning at the latest."

"You were in Europe yesterday." Her lips thinned--she already suspected. "What happened?"

Silence. If she didn't catch the faint sound of his breathing on the other end, she might have thought the line had been cut off.

Slowly, she answered for him. "It's for Phoenix Wright."

He didn't respond--more than that, she knew, better than anyone, he _couldn't_; she understood more than anyone how frozen and paralyzed the words laid against his throat. But he didn't have to.

"You fool," she said, a sigh interwoven between her words. The duties of an elder sister. "I'll be there."

---

They stood opposite of each other, the familiar glow of the courtroom shining against them both. The unfamiliar badge shown on his lapel--a symbol of their battle. She tasted fire once again, felt thrill rush through her veins--it had been so long since her skin had burned with this lust for _victory._

Not Papa's victory; not another victory to be listed under the von Karma name. Her own, against this man--_this _man, more than anyone else in the world.

He chuckled. She smirked, cracking the length of her whip against the desk before her.

"I've seen you somewhere before, haven't I?" the Judge asked, vague bewilderment entering his voice. "If I recall correctly, as a prosecutor…?"

Franziska scoffed. "Please. A weak man like this couldn't possibly be a prosecutor."

Miles's smirk only widened. Bowing with the flourish, he gestured for Franziska to call her first witness. They had both entered this arena at the last possible minute; they faced the same disadvantages. It was a matter of who broke first.

No, she felt Miles tell her, wordlessly, it's a matter of whose side the truth was on.

_Ridiculous._ But she was smiling.

A childlike giddiness filled her when he reeled back as she successfully countered one of his attacks, eyes wide, as though struck by a blow far worse than that of a whip. Behind closed eyes she could see knights and bishops falling against their checkered board.

He was still struggling, after all.

But he grew more certain with every contradiction, every correct move he made in this practice he hadn't been trained in, and as she watched him it became more and more apparent that he was following the example of a man who floundered at best when he had stood in the same place Miles stood now.

As it ended, she heard the echo of Phoenix Wright in his voice.

The judge considered the decision before him, before two lawyers who already know what decision he would pass--before declaring that the case needed more consideration given the points raised in the proceedings today. In so many words, it was Miles's victory.

"You were a great partner," he said to her, once the Judge had finished speaking.

Indignation flooded her--there was that trace of _little girl_ seeping through his tone with the presence of Phoenix Wright alongside of him, _coddling_. She thought it was the thing she hated most amongst everything that man, currently bound in the hospital, had done to change her life--the one thing she couldn't accept. "I don't care," she spat, and the snap of the whip resounded through the courtroom. The last witness, still lounging on the stand, yelped with the force of it, feebly covering his head with his arms, and eventually diving to the ground for cover.

_The only reason I came here was to defeat _you._ You fool._

He smiled. _I know._

As the gallery flooded out of the court, and the defendant was quietly directed back to the detention center, Franziska met Miles's gaze--briefly, but that was all she needed. She shook her head, finally allowing the sense of defeat flood her senses--it wasn't unfamiliar now--and let it wash away the tension that had so burned in her shoulders. She returned her whip to her belt.

It was enough, for now.

---

In Germany, immersing herself in work once again--endless cases and sordid murders, always surrounded by the bustle of witnesses and detective and forensic investigators and yet always in solitude--she hadn't ever managed to tell herself that she was happy.

Happiness had never quite been a question in her life before, of course. It had not occurred to her, and therefore had not troubled her, for that entire time.

But as she pushed the doors to the courthouse open before her, exiting--Phoenix Wright had already left the courthouse, smiling as another weight had been lifted off his shoulders--she found herself wondering all at once as Miles nearly collided with her back as she hesitated, frozen in place, as she caught the glint of sunlight against blonde hair—belonging to a woman waving to her frantically from the parking lot.

"Franziska!" The sound of her own name fell upon her like an ambush. Miles began with "That's--" but Franziska had managed to halfway regain her wits and moved fully outside as Adrian rushed her way up the steps--nearly stumbling over one of her heels--to greet her.

"It's you! It's really you! Why didn't you tell me you were coming back?"

"It was on rather short notice." She threw her head back, casting a look of particular significance to Miles Edgeworth, who only raised an eyebrow.

Adrian smiled.

"It's wonderful to see you again."

Franziska opened her mouth to reply--with what, she didn't know--that she was happy to see her, too? That she felt the same way? That she was glad Adrian seemed to be doing well for herself over the past year?--but none of it felt right, felt that it properly communicated the mess of muted feelings that arose upon seeing her more confident smile, so she said nothing.

She felt, though, and had the impression that Adrian thought so as well--that that was all right. They both seemed to understand regardless.

---

Her hands gripped the backs of Adrian's, closing both of their fingers around the handle of the whip.

"Your movements are too jerky." She'd risen from her seat in the lawn chair, leaving the drink Adrian had prepared on the glass table beside her. There had been hesitation written in every movement the other woman had taken; the whip was a weapon of fluidity--if one's movements were not smooth, not _assured,_ it would as soon turn back against its user as hit its intended mark. "What are you afraid of?"

"Well… I'm afraid of breaking something," Adrian confessed. "When I'm around, things have a way of sort of, um--flying off the shelves, or out of my arms, or… whatever else they might be sitting under at the time."

In her father's house, the hours had just broken into evening. The trophy had wobbled precariously off the edge of its stand, surreally, foreboding, before tipping over and shattering into pieces against the floor. The little girl had stood paralyzed, unbelieving, the whip still clenched in her hands, not realizing her legs had given out from under her until she heard the impact of her knees against the hardwood floor. The servants had screamed when they had seen it.

Franziska had had nightmares for weeks in the time before her father had come home from his business trip. She remembered that his face had been impassive as the head of housecleaning tried to explain the unfortunate accident with the young mistress. She had cringed, burying her face within blankets in her room, anticipating beatings, anticipating starvation, anticipating her being thrown to the streets and left to die in a hole.

None of those things had happened. Manfred von Karma seemed to think that to leave her to her fantasies, to draw out the duration of time she had to live with them, was enough. She remembered there was a chill in her stomach on understanding that that seemed to surpass the physical torments she had associated with the notion of punishment up until then.

She felt Adrian's hands move under hers, and her focus shifted back onto the present.

"We're outside, Adrian. There's nothing to break."

"I know, but…" She squirmed. "I guess I'm a little…" She laughed. "It's embarrassing to admit, but I keep thinking I'm going to hit myself."

"It'll probably happen." Miles had sat with her--two children sharing yet another secret--and carefully run the brush through her hair until it fell against her cheeks in a way that hid the mark she had inflicted upon herself. "But there's no point in worrying about it."

"Yes," Adrian said, uneasy, "I suppose you're right."

Franziska drew behind Adrian, forcibly sliding her thumb towards the top of the handle. "Now draw back your arm. Relax your grip. One quick, decisive motion. Put your entire arm into it."

Adrian's arm lunged forward--but the motion was, yet again, concentrated too much in her wrist, and the length of the whip flopped uselessly in front of them both. Eventually it settlied on the deck in a mocking sort of coil. Franziska was unable to suppress her sigh.

"Oh, I'm hopeless." Adrian gave a self-conscious sort of laugh, letting her arms drop back in front of her.

"Considerably so," Franziska agreed.

Adrian shoved at her in jest. "Oh, you!"

Franziska let her go, shaking her head in bemusement, to return to her drink. The ice clinked against the glass as she drained what was left of it--it was such a small thing, but she was grateful, she found, to be here watching the sunset, feeling the cooling air on her skin, and being able to pay mind to something as small as the sound of glass pressing against ice.

"Franziska?"

"What?" It was a little grating, the way Adrian prefaced what she had to say with that particular tilt to her name. She knew it was a request for permission.

"You're going back to Germany soon, aren't you?"

"In a few days." She set the glass down and turned back to face the other woman.

Adrian bit her lip.

"Couldn't you stay… a little longer?"

"I have work to get done, Adrian."

"I see. I guess there isn't any helping that…"

A moment passed. Franziska opened her mouth to speak, intending to suggest Adrian try her hand at the whip once more, but Adrian spoke over her, abruptly. The surprise alone was enough to make her stop and listen.

"I've always…" Adrian spoke quietly, her eyes drifting upwards. "When I was a little girl, I've always thought it would be wonderful to travel--all over the world, seeing everything I could."

Franziska stayed silent, sensing that she still had more to say, pricks of wariness rising on the back of her neck.

"I remember picking up travel brochures whenever I could, reading them over and over. All sorts of places." She smiled, her fingers starting to intertwine nervously over the whip's handle. "I remember thinking that… that Germany seemed like a good place to visit."

Franziska tilted her head--this seemed like a strange tangent to move onto.

"It's not particularly remarkable. The justice system is a fair cut above the one here, however. I will say that. But I doubt that would interest you."

Adrian's smile was shadowed. "Still."

And what Adrian was saying--what she was _really_ saying, as she sighed and offered the whip back to Franziska--hit her all at once.

"You're asking to come with me?"

The flush of embarrassment across Adrian's face was more than answer enough.

Franziska was only able to stare, disbelief flooding her senses.

But she caught sight of it, clearly, just for a moment--a life, a _life_, where she would be able to separate herself from the pedestal of pride and isolation, clinging to faded memories of a little brother just to remain breathing; a life in which someone would be waiting for her at the end of everything, with human imperfections and human warmth and flawed human devotion. She forced her expression to remain stony, but allowed her hands to tighten around Adrian's, for a brief moment--and realized she had wisps of dust caught in her hair, shimmering like flecks of silver in the fading sunlight.

Her lips parted, but several seconds passed before she spoke.

"I'll consider it."

---

She'd been reluctant, at best, to come here. She was no friend of Phoenix Wright's, to begin with, and had little reason to believe he would have interest in attending, much less funding, a "going-away party" for she and Miles.

"It's not _just_ that," Maya Fey--Phoenix Wright's assistant--had insisted, hands on her hips. "I'm… we're all grateful to you and Mr. Edgeworth too, you know." Franziska had been entirely unsure how to respond to _that_, which Maya seemed to take as an implicit acceptance to her invitation, and with renewed cheer had given her the location--the Gatewater Hotel--and the date--the day after tomorrow. "I'll see you there, okay? All you have to do is show up. We'll have a great time, I promise!"

She brought it up to Miles on the phone later, when her feelings had settled from bewildered annoyance to something much more like bemusement.

"I think you should come," Miles had said, simply.

She had lost so many parts of him. She had long come to terms with this, now, since their departure from the airport a year ago, but it still stung--the way an old wound might throb intermittently--when she saw him smiling for someone else. Her temper flared outright when she caught the faint sound of his laughter from another corner of the hotel, and she sated it somewhat by inflicting physical violence on the oafish detective, ruining his clumsy attempt to court the woman in spectacles beside him.

She would be angry; she would be petty and scowl and stamp her foot, but she would learn to tolerate it. Someday she might learn to be happy for him without reservation; it was the sort of thing, she had decided, that Franziska von Karma would have the grace to allow.

He moved next to her, his conversation with Maya Fey apparently finished, a look of satisfaction on his face that had nothing to do with victory. It suited him, she thought. It seemed to her now that Miles was one who was meant to change the world, rather than triumph over it.

"You seem distracted," he said, meeting her gaze. "Is something on your mind?"

"Hmph."

He tilted his head, just so. "Franziska."

She leaned back, resting against the wall. "It's just a strange thing, isn't it," she said, slowly, choosing her words with careful deliberation. "How we've both ended up--here."

They both understood that _here_ was not a reference to the lobby of a hotel.

Miles considered for a long moment. Finally, he began to speak, words forming with the same eloquence that had been forged alongside her in her father's house; speaking of many things she still did not quite care to follow, things of trust and belief and companionship and purpose and _truth_, most of all--concepts in which she still trailed behind him, still learning and not quite ready to meet them in the eye. So she didn't listen, not really.

But she saw his eyes become distant as he continued speaking; she recognized that he was no longer really addressing her and the familiar ache flared in her chest. She suspected that no matter what she did, it would never fully fade--and followed his gaze to where Phoenix Wright was muddling aimlessly at the other end of the hotel.

She realized with a start it was the same. He had grown older and he had grown stronger, but in some respects had never quite divorced himself from the quiet emotions of the boy gazing in silence out the window.

She had not grown enough that she had reached the point where she could stand seeing it unfold right in front of her--not yet. She knew that. So she reached for anything with which to cut him off.

"Adrian Andrews," she said, and Miles blinked, "has asked permission to accompany me to Germany, for a time."

He looked at her, interrupted mid-sentence and broken from his reverie, and it took him a few seconds to recover from the unspoken remnants of his thoughts.

"Did she?"

"In a way. Stammering, dancing around the topic, the way only the most foolish of fools could be proud of. You can imagine, I'm certain."

"Ah. If you put it that way, yes." He considered for a moment. "And? How did you respond?"

"I suppose from her perspective, I didn't."

He looked thoughtful. "How very unlike you."

"Oh?"

"The Franziska I knew," he said, the lilt of fond reminiscence coloring his voice, "would only hesitate if there were a very good reason for it. The Franziska I knew thrived in her certainty, despite what anyone else might say to her. She is not someone to hold her tongue only for the sake of sparing another's feelings. She is not one to sidestep. Franziska von Karma is someone who gives certainties in her silences."

Franziska shook her head. If he had been right once, he was wrong now. But she didn't tell him that.

"What exactly is it that you're trying to say?"

"Only," he said, tilting his glass so that he could study both of their reflections in its curve, "that you do seem rather taken by the idea."

Her mouth curved downwards. "Taken, you say?"

"If I had to say one or the other," he said, with the ghost of his old smile. "Yes. I would say taken."

She looked at him full on then, at his face framed in the dimming lights of the hotel; the brush of warm twilight against his cheek. She exhaled deeply; raising a gloved hand to rub the back of her knuckles against the moisture threatening to gather at the corners of her eyes. They were paralyzed on the edge of her lips: the various things that she wanted so much to tell him that he was and always had been in her life. Brother. Savior. Enemy. First love.

"Miles," she said instead, "thank you."

He looked startled, wine nearly tipping over the edge of his glass, and she thought she saw him start to say something. But Franziska didn't give him time to respond--she had already taken off at a confident stride, her target fixed on Adrian's figure standing in awkward solitude by the entrance.

---

She didn't bother turning on the lights.

In the chaos that revolved around Phoenix Wright's final trial against the man who identified himself as Godot, and her involvement within, she had barely returned to the room she had reserved for nearly four days now. It seemed pointless to have had had made the arrangements in the first place.

She had never lowered herself to stay at such a low-class hostel before, where the breakfasts were mass-produced and the janitors operated under the standards of adequate functionality.

But their negligence had left traces of dust spiraling in the air before the windows, the last traces of sunlight making them glow a vibrant red. She stared. She was three years old again, drowning herself in a world that defined lines outside the will of her father.

Franziska stepped towards the window, breathing it in. Cupped her hands, and blew.

---

Two days later, she stood on the doorsteps leading into Adrian Andrews's apartment. The plane tickets were thin and fragile in both of her hands.

She had hesitated before purchasing them both--she had learned what a flimsy thing a final decision could be, tested over and over and over. She learned that she had no real grasp on what true resolution was, and it was odd, in a way, with the glow of the computer monitor against her face, to finally understand that any future she could foresee in the upcoming years were no less plagued with doubt than the ones that preceded them. Her stomach was twisting in knots even now, unsure of what she would say when the door opened.

But somehow, that was all right. It seemed that things often turned out that way when it came to Adrian.

In one hand, she held dream; in the other, she clutched duty.

Franziska pressed her fists together before her, touching her lips to both, before stepping forward to knock on Adrian's door, waiting for her to answer.

**the end.**


End file.
